Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends: Imaginary Invaders (DS)
This review has been a long time coming, well it wouldn't have been if the game wasn't so hard to hard to find in my city, but I digress.
After playing the game to near completion (Finishing the main game, but still haven't found 100% of the collectibles.) I can sum up my experience with this game in eight words.
"Good, but could have been a lot better."
Positives.
The Music was well done, the familiar theme song is there in all of it's psychedelic rag time glory, and the in stage themes were catchy and didn't overstay their welcome.
The play control was was very responsive for the most part (More on that later), the jumping and moving about was spot on and never messed you up with unresponsiveness.
Graphically the game looked better then I expected, I know sometimes making the leap from 2D to 3D can have some ugly consequences but in this game (With a few exceptions) the transition came out pretty well.
The mini games and boss fights were fun. The nods to classic games like Space invaders and on various on rail shooting games is always aces in my book.
The in game dialogue stayed true to the characters. Filled with all the little quirks and in jokes we've come to expect. (Of course bringing on a long time Foster's scribe to handle the writing duties will do that for ya.)
Good use of the dual screens, I was never at a loss as where to go next thanks to the in game map.
Negatives.
Sadly the game was criminally short and very easy. I wasn't expecting a game the length of Final Fantasy. But a few more levels would have been nice, (An outside hedge maze level would have been cool.) As for the challenge I can give that pass given the games target audience, on the other hand I grew up in an era where even the games based on kids licenses were hard as sin, sign of the times again.
While I did say the play control was good most of the time there was still some hiccups that keep it from being perfect, some of the touch screen sections were kind of wonky (Especially the one at the end of the game.) and it was kind of annoying having to switch between the touch screen and control pad in some areas of the game. (I guess games like this were made for the thumb stylus.)
Bloo looked kind of off model in 3D, you would think they would have done a better rendering job on the main character of the show, but only a minor quibble.
Also shame on them having no character voice clips from anyone other then Mac or Bloo. (Again minor quibble...)
So to sum up there was the foundations for a great game laid out in this one, and if the circumstances were right for a sequel (Which I am guess there probably won't be due to the show ending and the publisher Midway in financial dire straits.) With a little spit and polish they could take what they've got here and make it better and brighter then before.
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